Staying Awake To Chase A Dream
by GloriousBlackout
Summary: Mark has his fair share of nightmares during his time on Mars. He supposes he can live with that, so long as he's able to get back to his crew.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N** **\- I've finally been able to see the film (and loved it) and it made the urge to write for The Martian even worse so here we are. I hope you enjoy this and any feedback is appreciated :)**

* * *

Mark is not surprised that drifting off to sleep in the sols following his abandonment on Mars is a rather difficult affair.

For one, the barely healed hole in his side still hurts like a bitch and forces him to lie on his back - something he'd been quite happily avoiding all of his life. And then there are the moments where he finally does manage to fall asleep and his brain decides that dwelling on his future death by starvation/asphyxiation/explosion at all hours of the day isn't enough, he needs to do it as he rests as well.

He wakes in a cold sweat more often than not, having thought he had already reached sol 400 and was onto his last food pack, and it takes a moment for the reality to sink in; that he still has time to figure out a plan, that he is not in immediate danger just yet. He is not hopeless, no matter what the odds tell him.

He's lucky he's an optimist, because the nightmares only spur him on even more to figure out a way to survive, and before long he actually has a plan.

A plan that will have him sick of the sight of potatoes soon enough and which still doesn't get him to a MAV thousands of kilometres away, but a plan's a plan and that reassurance is enough to let the dreams of starvation fade a little.

* * *

Constant work in maintaining the HAB, recovering Pathfinder, dealing with NASA, growing potatoes and generally not dying has the desired effect of making him too exhausted for dreams.

Mark's grateful for the work during the day, back-breaking though it often is, as it provides a distraction that crappy seventies TV can't really do on its own. Which is a good thing, because a distraction from how fucking lonely he's becoming is something he really needs.

He misses Chris. Well, in truth he would give an arm and a leg just to have at least one member of his crew here with him (it would be unfair on said crew member, but at least there would be conversation), but in his quieter moments he finds that it's Chris he misses most of all. He misses waking up next to him on Earth; misses annoying him with his jokes but catching the other man struggling to hide a smile; misses being able to lazily watch movies with him on free Sunday afternoons. Even on the Hermes, where they had to be more discreet or face Lewis's wrath, they would still be able to smile at each other from across the table or give each other the odd hug. They could _talk_ to each other.

That's what Mark finds himself dreaming about more often than not these days, and it seems even crueller than dreaming of imminent death. He dreams of the life he'll likely never get again, dreams in which he has someone to talk to and hold, and then he wakes alone in a bunk with the nearest human beings quickly making their way back to Earth. The warmth from whatever fantasy he'd had the night before melts away instantly and he suddenly feels cold and numb, and it takes more effort than it should to crawl out of bed and get to work.

But he does. Because if he wants to have any of that back – if he wants to see Chris and the crew again – he needs to be productive, and right now there's a Rover waiting outside that needs to be modified for the umpteenth time.

* * *

The worst dreams come after his airlock decides to go on a sudden vacation fifty metres away from the Hab and kills his crops, and his hopeless situation somehow becomes even more dire.

The strange thing he finds though, is that he doesn't dream of what horrible things are yet to happen to him like he did on those first few sols. Perhaps he wastes enough energy doing that when he's awake, or maybe the fact that he still has NASA on his side has given him more hope than he'd thought.

Either way, he finds that when he closes his eyes these days, his mind transports him back to an alternate sol 6; one in which the antenna had thought 'fuck it, stranding one astronaut here isn't enough, let's strand _two'._

And of course, it's always Chris who is the most badly injured; Chris who ends up being skewered by the antenna while Mark is simply dragged along with him (his dreams are never specific enough on that point. He could question the logic of Lewis leaving them both behind when he at least has readings on his bio-monitor, but he never has enough lucidity in dreams to question plot-holes). Mark is left to watch uselessly as Chris performs risky surgery on himself, only to then decide that there's no point and refuse to eat because he's an idiot. One who seems to have figured out the math concerning food just as easily as Mark has, and decides to be self-sacrificing in order to give at least one of them a chance.

Mark knows that if any of that had really happened, he would have practically force-fed Chris if he had to. He'd have tried to figure out how to sustain them both, and if that hadn't worked then at least they'd have had a good 200 sols of survival, and all with the luxury of not being completely isolated from another human being.

In his dreams, it's only five sols before he's left on his own and he wakes up feeling like someone has chipped away at his soul.

He's taken to re-reading the messages Martinez had sent from Hermes just to remind himself that all of his crew-mates are alive and well. Each time he reads them he's faced with just how much he misses them all, especially Martinez's unmatched ability to joke around, but the words bring relief as well. He can accept himself dying – has had a lot of time to come to terms with it – so long as his friends are okay.

He feels like a sap everytime he thinks that, and he makes sure to compensate by joking around more than usual on the logs, but the sentimentality of it doesn't make it any less true.

* * *

He and Chris used to say they'd go on a road-trip one day, once their feet were firmly planted back on Earth. In the early days of their trip to Mars, when Earth was still big and beautiful below them, they would spend their free hours at the windows looking down; seeing which areas of the world seemed the most beautiful from space and adding them to their list of 'places to go'.

Sometimes Johanssen and Vogel would join them and joke about how it could be a proper team road-trip, leading them all to choose more and more ludicrous locations (although Vogel would always just wait for Europe to come around again and point at Germany as the ideal every time).

Even if he wasn't stuck on another planet, Mark doesn't think he could see that road-trip happening anymore. Driving on his own for miles on end in a Rover is bad enough and, much as he loves them, he can't imagine spending weeks in a Jeep with his crew and not wanting to kill them all by the end of it.

He dreams of the trip though. He can see himself driving along golden coastlines or among snow-capped mountains or past centuries-old castles; Chris smiling in the passenger seat while Johanssen, Vogel and Martinez act like their adopted children in the back. It's pleasant, for a while at least, until the winding roads of the French Alps slip away to become endless, dry desert that never ends no matter how far he drives, and he turns at the sudden quiet to find that his friends are gone.

To be fair, in terms of nightmares, it's pretty standard and nothing he can't deal with (he's the King of Mars, he can deal with anything). It's just a pain in the ass waking up from driving in a desert to then spend hours driving in a desert. It's a repetitiveness that makes him grateful that his daily workload is exhausting, because the more tired he is, the less likely he is to dream.

It could be worse though. At least in reality, his current journey has a destination. One that may even take him home.

* * *

Mark expects his last night on Mars to bring with it crippling fear that keeps him wide awake until the launch. After all, like he told the log, he will either be safely back with his crew by this time tomorrow... or dead. There's no in-between.

And yet, as he waits patiently in the quiet MAV, he finds a strange peace in his situation. His friends have come back for him, NASA have been a guiding force all along, and the world wants him to come home just as much as he does. The responsibility is out of his hands – nothing more he can do – and there's something about that that makes his loneliness slip away for a while.

It's a nice feeling. Usual nerves aside.

So when he closes his eyes and tries to get some sleep instead of sit and do nothing, it's a pleasant surprise when he finds himself walking through a quiet park back on Earth, admiring the plants with a new-found appreciation while Chris smiles beside him and tries to look interested.

He supposes that if he dies tomorrow, it's a cruel dream for his mind to have offered him; the promise of something he'll never have. But as launch approaches, he finds that he doesn't care. It's a chance to spend some time on Earth, fabricated though it all is, and he wakes feeling somewhat content for once.

* * *

It still surprises Mark that he can honestly say that he's going home. It's been around 20 days since he got back to Hermes; 20 glorious days in which he's been surrounded by other people and had real food to eat and real music to listen to. Sure, he's not home _yet_ ,but the possibility of even reaching Earth again has been out of his grasp for so long that he'll endure the remaining two-hundred days with all the patience of a damn saint.

He's grateful for the crew as well; those five wonderful people who were the closest human beings to him the entire time he was on Mars and who gave up five hundred days of their lives to save him. After all of the hugs had ended and the awe at the fact that he was finally leaving Mars behind him died down a little, it was surprisingly easy to slip back into their old team dynamics. Several broken ribs and general malnutrition have left him bed-ridden but he still gets visits from the crew in their free time and he finds himself anticipating each one with all the excitement of a child at Christmas.

Martinez still jokes around with him and constantly makes playful digs about martians and botanists, and it is so close to how their relationship was before Sol 6 that Mark could cry. Johanssen challenges him to her vintage video games and shyly mocks him every time he inevitably loses (it doesn't help that he's battling a super-nerd). Vogel shows him all the pictures of his family back in Germany that he hadn't been able to share before, and though that is nice in and of itself, Mark knows that the man is grounding him and reminding him of Earth. It's a realisation that has him grabbing the man in a bear-hug his ribs only endure thanks to morphine.

And Lewis... well, Lewis plays her disco music suspiciously louder than usual, but Mark can forgive that on the whole 'she committed mutiny to come back for me' thing. And he's only slightly ashamed to admit that he's starting to like ABBA.

He sees Chris most of all, given how his injuries and general lack of top-notch fitness keep the doctor busier than usual. The man is very good at being strict regarding eating healthily, staying in bed unless absolutely necessary and making sure he gets a decent amount of sleep, but Mark can see that Chris really cares and that his bossiness during the work hours is probably born from a place of sheer worry, so any complaints he has always die in his throat.

Besides, he gets to see plenty of non-professional Chris during the crew's sleeping hours. The nightmares haven't abated as easily as he'd have liked, despite the knowledge that he is safe (more than a year alone on Mars had to have some effect on his mind, he supposes) and he remembers Chris wandering into the medical bay on the first night to find him screaming into a pillow.

Chris has come by every night since. At first it was just to hold Mark's hand until he drifted off (which Mark only teased him mildly for) but now they will just sleep in the same bed every night. It helps more than he could have imagined; having Chris there means that he is woken during nightmares to soft hushes and whispered reassurances, and even just the presence of another body beside him as he sleeps is enough to banish the dreams completely on some nights.

Not tonight, it seems, but that's beside the point.

He's coming down quietly after experiencing the feeling of floating eternally in space in a tattered MAV - so quietly that he hasn't even woken Chris. He doesn't feel too awful anymore though. His heart is calming down gradually and he can breathe again, which is always nice, and the feeling of Chris's arms wrapped around him have a grounding effect that almost makes him feel silly for getting so worked up over a nightmare to begin with. He can feel the man's steady heartbeat through his shirt and he lets himself become boneless in those arms again as he wills himself to go back to sleep.

He's alive after all. He is alive, he is going home, he's going to see Earth again, the crew are alive, Chris is alive...

If someone could inform his sleeping mind of that, life would be perfect.

He knows he will be fine though, deep down. No matter what problems the NASA psychologists find while digging through his brain, he knows that he will be okay once all of this is over.

He's known it since the first moment Chris had summoned up the courage to wrap his arms tightly (if carefully) around him and say "I really missed you," and Mark had allowed himself to feel just how desperately he'd missed him too, and they'd held each other while crying like babies until the tears had turned to laughter as they discussed plans for the road-trip again ("Beth's tiny though, we'd probably need a child-seat in the back for her...").

After all of that, things have been easier - living with the crew has been easier - and he knows now that he has a future on Earth that will be happy so long as he has those people in it.

No nightmare can take that away from him. Not even Mars could.

Feeling calmer than he has in a while, he finally drifts off to sleep and dreams of home.


	2. Epilogue

It was on the seventh day of their hastily planned European road-trip that Mark realised that he hadn't grown tired of sharing a Jeep with three members of his crew yet. He was aware that those were famous last words – and there was still a fair bit of time left before they were to head back home – but after countless days of trekking through Mars on a rover, he was grateful that the opportunity for them all to enjoy a long break hadn't been shattered by awful past experiences.

It had been a year and a half since they'd finally landed back on Earth. One and a half years of press conferences, trying to dodge media attention, being constantly analysed by some of NASA's top psychologists, and generally getting used to simple things like normal gravity and breathable air being all around him again.

The nightmares had started to fade, much to his relief. He was aware that he wasn't perfect mentally; Mars had given him his fair share of baggage, and any notion of their trip including vast sandy places had been stamped out early on in planning. He was still touch-starved to such an extent that he felt uncomfortable when Chris (or even Beth, who'd shed any shyness on the trip home to give him tight hugs whenever he needed it) was away for a long time, and sometimes he would space out and need to be brought back to the present again.

But he was coping. He'd been able to move in with Chris, he saw the other members of his crew fairly regularly, and the media had finally moved on from the miracle of the man on Mars. And now he was on a road-trip they'd only ever joked about; back when they'd been looking down on Earth from Hermes and dreaming of the future.

Their journey today had taken them to the south of France; Chris being the only one brave enough to drive along narrow, winding roads as they climbed higher and higher into the Alps. Several motorcyclists speeding past them had given Mark mild heart attacks on a few occasions but otherwise the trip had gone smoothly, and they'd ended up at a Bed and Breakfast in a small village that looked down onto a valley. The owner, an elderly woman who spoke perfect English, seemed entirely unfazed by the four astronauts requesting a room and had only told them to keep the noise down before leaving them to their own devices.

Besides himself and Chris, only Beth and Rick had actually been able to join them. Melissa and her husband had been on a voyage of their own; hunting down some 'classic' disco albums all across the USA now that she'd been given some time off. They would meet Vogel later on in their trip and stay with him for a few days, but only after they'd travelled through the Alps into Italy and up through Austria before finally reaching their friend's beloved homeland. Mark was pretty sure the man would drag them through all the must-see places Germany had to offer to the point where they'd all be exhausted, but he was looking forward to seeing him again all the same.

Rick would leave them after that, considering his future involvement in Ares 5 gave him a much tighter schedule, and whether or not they'd continue east would be a decision the rest of them could make when the time came. For now though, Mark was perfectly happy with sitting still on the small bench outside their B&B, looking down at a landscape he'd never thought he'd get the chance to see again.

It truly was beautiful up here. The village consisted of small wooden houses scattered across a winding road that climbed endlessly, while the view proudly showcased countless miles worth of jutting hills, tall forests and, far below them, green fields that stretched as far as he could see. The sky was blue with only the odd cloud here and there, and despite their altitude it was still fairly warm.

He knew that Beth would be further up the hill by now, taking photos from every angle she could manage to post on her blog (because apparently there were still a collection of people who had an interest in their lives, and she was the most tech savvy of the group). Rick was inside, probably trying to maintain a good enough signal to talk to his family on Skype at this point. Knowing they were so close helped Mark breathe a little; let him embrace being alone with his thoughts rather than feel the crushing weight of loneliness.

Not that he was alone for long. He saw Chris's shadow get bigger on the grass before he heard him approach, and he gave his partner a small, reassuring smile as he sat beside him. Chris returned it before automatically shifting over so that their bodies were touching, and it was the type of action that made Mark wonder all over again what he'd done to deserve Chris.

When they'd first met and gotten together, Mark had been carefree with no emotional baggage and he knew it must have been strange for Chris to see him shaking in his sleep from nightmares or curling up during storms or power cuts, or even just panicking more than he should if Chris left the house for two minutes.

And yet, Chris had stayed. Had promised to help him and had never once backed down. Had started to give small hugs whenever he could, or held Mark's hand if he seemed like he was zoning out, or woke him up and reminded him that he was safe when the night terrors reared their ugly head. And he was here now, thousands of miles away from home, ready to go anywhere Mark wanted to. It was overwhelming at times, just how much he was loved, but he knew he wouldn't have recovered nearly as well as he had without Chris by his side.

"You okay?" Chris asked, linking his fingers with Mark's and following his gaze out to the valley beyond them. Mark nodded, relieved that it was the truth, and squeezed Chris hand to emphasise it.

"I just-" he started, and he was suddenly very aware that he didn't have the words for what he was feeling right now; didn't know how to express what being able to travel and see all these places after being stuck on a desolate planet meant to him. "The whole time I was on Mars, I might as well have been in a box. A massive, sandy box, but a box that barely changed and cut me off from everyone I cared about."

Chris didn't interrupt, but he could feel that the man's eyes moving away from the landscape and onto his face. The silence helped; he could feel his head starting to clear and he finally knew what he was getting at.

"And it's like, the longer I'm in that box the more I forget what's outside of it, because all I know is sand and craters and maybe the odd valley. So this," he gestured to the landscape around them, the age-old beauty of the hills and the forests and the distant snow-capped mountains hidden behind clouds. "I never thought I'd have this again. I never even thought I'd see any of you again, let alone Earth. So this... right now, it's like I'm seeing all of this for the first time."

He trailed off lamely, not sure if any of that made sense, but he could feel Chris squeeze his hand and he turned to see a small smile that barely masked the sadness in those blue eyes. Mark had always joked that Chris was an open book, and he certainly couldn't hide now. Feeling overly sentimental himself, Mark gave the man the biggest grin he could manage in an attempt to break the tension. "Look at me, spouting pseudo-intellectual bullshit. Who'd have thought, eh?"

Chris laughed before resting his head against Mark's shoulder, and Mark felt a lightness that assured him they'd be okay tonight. "Save the intellectual shit for the NASA recruits. They'll love it."

Mark smiled and wrapped his arm around Chris in a not-so-subtle attempt to bring him closer. Mars had turned him into a hugger, it seemed, but he couldn't complain if it meant he got to be this close to Chris on a regular basis. "You know I love you, right?"

"Well, you've only told me twice today so I was starting to doubt it," Chris replied, and he looked up at him with a proud smirk. Mark didn't have time to form a retort before Chris leaned forward and kissed him lightly, the smirk giving away to a smile he knew was genuine. "I love you too."

They stayed cuddled up on the bench for a while after that, being interrupted only by the occasional dog-walker or car struggling up the steep roads. A red sunset was starting to form shadows on the grass when Beth finally returned from her hike, scanning her photos and only seeming to notice them both as she started for the door.

"You two are sickening, you know that?" she said, struggling to hide a smirk as she wandered over to the bench; the promise of a wifi connection seemingly forgotten.

"Hey, you knew that when you decided to come with us," Mark said, arms raised in mock defiance. "I'm pretty sure that "by the way - Mark and Chris will be annoyingly cuddly at all times" was written on the terms and conditions somewhere."

Beth giggled before telling Chris to budge up so she could sit with them. The doctor only managed one exaggerated groan before he obliged and Beth slid in beside them easily. It helped that she was tiny; her small size had probably made the back of the Jeep endlessly more bearable for both herself and Rick. It had certainly kept the whining to a minimum, meaning Chris and Mark had only had to pretend to be exasperated parents once while in a particularly packed traffic-jam in Paris.

They sat in comfortable silence as Beth set about showing them the photos she'd taken, her walk up the hill having benefited her greatly in terms of the sheer beauty she'd managed to capture. When she ran out of the day's photos and stumbled upon an exaggerated Paris-selfie of them all sticking their tongues out, she extended the camera as far as she could and proposed; "Another one for the sake of it?"

"Why not?" Mark shrugged, already planning his best ugly pose. "We can show Martinez and make him feel left out."

Beth grinned and started to count down, allowing Mark to reach around her and place his arm around Chris again. He barely had time to notice the man's responding smile before he pulled a face just in time for the flash. It was worth it for Beth's scandalised look and Chris's sudden laughter as they checked the image.

He could get used to this. Spending time with his friends in an environment that wasn't constantly trying to kill them. Being able to relax and laugh with them as they drove through mountains and on endless European motorways. The journey with the Rover seemed long forgotten now; his complaints about the endless days trapped in such a small space rendered void.

In that moment, Mark knew he would give anything to make their current journey last as long as he could.


End file.
